Time Tested Solution

In the years before Napoleon dismantled it, Voltaire quipped that the Holy Roman Empire was “neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.” Well, of course not. It was an amalgamation of independent German kingdoms, fiefdoms, and statelets, lightly bound together by a powerless Grand Moose or whatever with no revenue, army, courts, or police.

Much the same goes today for the United Nations. It is neither united, nor nations.

Oh sure, there are quite a few honest-to-goodness real nation-states in the UN

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The Holy Roman Empire was more than jut parts of Germany, it included parts of Italy and parts of other various regions depending on familial relationships and who happened to be ruling the “Empire” at the time (Spain was a part of the Holy Roman Empire for some time). It was really an odd political entity. Napoleon’s conquests finally ended the weirdness and consolidated much of Europe into cohesive blocks, which then remained largely cohesive (on their own or under other powers) after his defeats. It’s no coincidence that the creation of the unified nations of Italy and Germany occured during the 19th century, as those movements have heritages which trace right back to Napoleon’s reorganizations of the region (especially Germany, which is odd and ironic in so many ways if you think about it).

Anywho, this got me to thinking about the whole laughability of the idea of an “Old Europe”. Certainly there is much of Europe that is “Old” and backward looking. But really Europe has been reorganized and changed around so much so recently that it’s really ludicrous to give them a label denoting maturity or stability. Really, the American state is much older and more mature than the relative new comers of the Europe of today. Even Canada is older than most of the modern European states. Britain is about the only close competition with America in that regard, since its current, modern form of governance et al dates from the early to mid 19th century. Most of the rest of Europe is running on a frankensteinian amalgum of stubborn traditions and relatively new modernism dating from anywhere between a bit over a century to under half a century or less in ages. And that doesn’t even really take into account the discontinuity and reorganizations from WWII.

Multilateral organizations rarely work and the UN is multilateralism to an extreme. The only exception requires both a narrow purpose and a crisis to make it functional. NATO, during the cold war, was probably the most functional multilateral organization for many years. The UN is the final pipe dream of Wilson and Roosevelt’s “one world” crowd. We don’t need the UN, we can’t afford the UN and reforming it is like trying to reform a virus.

The UN is doomed. Any more time or treasure wasted on it is an insult.

The first step: Public audits. After that, I’d be willing to listen to other ideas.

No public audits – and by public I mean “available to everyone on the Internet and/or by request for a nominal copying/shipping fee” – no more money and any talk of “reform” is not reform; it’s just more of the same.

I made a suggestion to one company concerning how to fix the problem they had with moral and back stabbing, plus the related additude, and it seems fitting to the U.N.:

Fire Everybody. Send every diplomat home, every secretary, every intern. Every single person.

In the next month, replace everybody. Don’t start hiring, or even looking, until all the rooms are cleared out and clean. Don’t give any person, nation, ideal the idea that they can not be replaced if they screwed up. Do not let a single person return.

And that might rid the the UN of corruption for a few months at least.

But we could keep the name, the office, the structure. Often the way things work, without a purge, quite a few organizations become narrow, bitter, and political. In other words, sick.

We do talk about replacing the UN with something new, but in reality it is simply the people and nations involved that are the problem. Here is the UN charter:

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WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED
to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind, and

to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small, and

to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained, and

to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

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By re-affirming the charter (and not allowing nations in that do not conform to it Cough*Iran*cough*Syria*Cough*N. Korea*cough*Cuba*cough http://www.un.org/Overview/unmember.html ) the world might get the UN as it was suppose to be. Until a purge is done, the UN as it currently sits is not the same creature our post WWII birthing of it was intended for.

Actually, the last Holy Roman Emperor did become a “real” emperor; Francis II, by the grace of God elected Emperor of the Romans, ever-august, proclaimed himself Emperor of Austria two years before he (against its own constitution) dissolved it in 1806.

The Holy Roman refers to Rome and Papal support of the Empire. The HRE’s purpose was to be the secular and military branch of the Roman church. The Church had little authority without a powerful military ally. The HRE had no authority without the Pope’s blessing.